So apparently Perdita now only takes thirty-minute naps when she's at home, which is delightful, as you can imagine. Daycare's reporting of her two-hour snoozes each day is starting to feel like a taunt. And she has initiated potty usage, which is awesome but means that leaving the house requires almost an hour of extra prep time built in, for visits to the bathroom. End result: I feel like I have even less time than I did before. But heavens, she is so much fun.
Yesterday we were reading a book that features mice, and she decided that on every page she was going to point to each mouse and ask, "What's that?" "Mouse" was one of her first words, so she was clearly doing this for fun, but it started to drive me crazy, and around mouse #75 I said, "You tell me what that is," and she said "I don't know," with such sociopathic unconcern for the truth that I became hysterical with laughter. That story makes no sense, I know; even if you are a parent and know what it's like to say "mouse" 80 times in a row you might not understand why I couldn't stop laughing. Perhaps the moment simply epitomized the deranged nature of life with a toddler.
We also made a trip to our little local library yesterday, for the first time with Perdita. I know that seems super-late (she's almost two!), but she has historically been a bit destructive towards books in her enthusiasm for them, and I feared having to buy a new copy of every library book we brought home. But that has mostly passed, and it felt like the perfect winter twilight for a walk to our little town's library. It's in a steeply gabled stone building with narrow windows and the rooms inside are dark and cozy; as far a cry as possible from most modern libraries, with their metal shelves and fluorescent lighting. The children's room is awash in toys, so that was all Perdita paid attention to; I picked out the books we took home. We've read them over and over since then, though, so I think we can count this as a success. Likely it will be our new Saturday thing!
Read since last posting:
The Keeper of Lost Causes, by Jussi Adler-Olsen. Super-dark and disturbing, but Adler-Olsen's hero managed to be as messed-up and cynical as heroes of Scandinavian noir apparently have to be, while remaining interesting and even occasionally sympathetic. I figured out the reason for the crime long before we were shown it, but I still had a hard time putting this down.
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession, by Alison Hoover Bartlett. Boring, sadly. Bartlett tries to get us to believe that she's stumbled across a fascinating criminal mind, but she's just found a petty thief who happens to have fixated on rare books.
Moonfleet, by J. Meade Faulkner. Nineteenth-century novel supposedly along the lines of Treasure Island, but not nearly as much fun. Young boy takes up with smugglers, behaves stupidly, keeps having older men sacrifice life and liberty for him because they love him so much and are so honorable. Has anyone done a study on nineteenth-century literature that is about a teenage boy and an older man, in which the boy keeps acting as stupid and inclined-to-faint as your average Dickens heroine and the man keeps vowing his eternal devotion, and how wish fulfillment for teenage boys in Victorian England was apparently the exact same genre as wish fulfillment for grown women in late-twentieth-century America? Or am I the only one who thinks about academic papers drawing parallels between Alan Stewart in Kidnapped and the much taller incarnations of Scottish manhood in your average romance novel (or Long John Silver and Fabio-portrayed pirates)? Hell, Daphne du Maurier did the romance-novel-with-smugglers, even! Suggestions for this paper's title will be eagerly accepted.
The Tilted World, by Tom Franklin. Excellently-written, evocative novel about moonshining during Prohibition. It does fall victim to the "a childless woman is an empty vessel" thing, a bit, but is nevertheless very good.
The Queen of the Tearling, by Erika Johansen. I went to college with Johansen, and was excited to hear that her first novel had come out and was doing really well, but it still took me a long time to get around to reading it. I don't generally like fantasy, and read it rarely. But I did enjoy this a lot, although our heroine moved way too fast from "isolated orphan" to "brilliant infallible queen" for my tastes, even with magic genetics / destiny coming into play. And once it's become clear this is actually a futuristic dystopia, and set in a land to which people fled from America at some point, you can get tangled up in trying to figure out exactly where they are, which is distracting. But I'll read the sequels, and would recommend to those who do like fantasy.
Giving Up the Ghost: A Story About Friendship, 80s Rock, a Lost Scrap of Paper, and What It Means to Be Haunted, by Eric Nuzum. A decent if extremely forgettable memoir about mental illness.
Balm, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. I remember hating the story of Perkins-Valdez's Wench so much that I couldn't pay any attention to the writing, but I did like this book, about post-Civil-War Chicago and several different protagonists making new lives there. And I was able to notice that Perkins-Valdez has no small skill with language.
May all your library trips and winter twilights be charming.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Monday, January 18, 2016
2016's first books
I don't have too much to say about 2016 so far. Perdita and I are now three for three in terms of Years Begun With Bronchitis (the first one she was in utero), which always sucks, but everyone is doing better now, thank goodness. Her naps are totally unpredictable in length these days, though, so I'm just going to try to pound these reviews out fast. Forgive the scattered thoughts.
Read so far in the new year:
Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869, by Stephen Ambrose. Unfortunately, this was a bit boring. Nowhere near as good as Ambrose's book about Lewis and Clark, which I think I will re-read, because there are only about 150 books on my to-read list OH GEEZ.
Started Early, Took My Dog, by Kate Atkinson. Atkinson is super-incredible and I am always excited about her new books and I have to psych myself up for, literally, years to read them. A little ways into this one I really thought I wouldn't be able to go on - child endangerment, dog endangerment, elder endangerment: you name a creature or concept for which you have fondness, Atkinson will break your heart over it. I got through, but the feeling of virtue overrode, if only by a hair, the feeling of enjoyment. The balance has always tipped slightly the other way with her books I've read before.
Thin Air, by Ann Cleeves. I am usually super-into Cleeves' Shetland mysteries, but this one was disappointing. For some reason it pulled out all the old offensive tropes about sexually (and/or professionally) confident women deserving death, and quiet mousy women who date attractive men deserving to be cheated on (or, in many cases [though not this one], the attractive man turns out to be the murderer, because only a homicidal sociopath would date a woman less physically attractive or socially gregarious than himself). There was just too much punishment going on here for it to be a good read.
London Falling, by Paul Cornell. Fifty pages into a foul-mouthed and utterly confusing police procedural with corrupt heroes (reminded me horribly of David Peace's "Red Riding" series; reading half of one of those books measurably diminished my quality of life), I ventured onto the internet to see why this book was popular. And every review said, "The first hundred pages are a nightmare but get through them. Do it." So I carried on. And HOLY COW. It turns into a crazy, designed-for-the-screen (in a good way) supernatural story that I could not put down. Super-gory and scary and drily, Britishly funny and so good. I have the movie / TV show totally cast in my head, and my only regret is that Idris Elba cannot play every role, and I sort of get the feeling Cornell regrets that too. Apparently there's a sequel? Super-psyched!
Copperhead, by Bernard Cornwell. Novel about the Civil War, and clearly researched up one side and down the other, but I really do not care what happens to a protagonist who was raised by abolitionists in Boston but decided to go fight for the South just to piss off his dad. Really. That's our hero. Every now and then he's like, "Well, yes, I suppose if I thought about it I would believe slavery is wrong, but I just don't think about it," and that's the end of it. How nice for you, sir!
The Lost Girls: The True Story of the Cleveland Abductions and the Incredible Rescue of Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus, by John Glatt. At the risk of writing a review shorter than the book's title, I can only say that Glatt is not a very interesting writer and so this book is just a timeline of abuse, and accordingly unpleasant.
The Devil's Making, by Sean Haldane. Historical mystery set in nineteenth-century Canada. The mystery part is kind of minor - you can tell immediately who the murderer is - and it's mostly about our narrator falling in love with a Native woman. The book walks dangerously close to "noble savage" territory in its characterizations, but I rather liked it.
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, by Erik Larson. Meh; Diana Preston's book about the Lusitania is much better. Larson assumes that his readers are total wusses: he has a big ol' Graphic Content warning about an autopsy section that is more decorously vague than anything post-Agatha Christie, and while he technically mentions that lifeboats were being dropped from the ship directly onto other lifeboats full of people, it's literally: "so-and-so saw that the lifeboat fell onto the one below it, and so turned away and tried to find another way off the ship". What happens to the people in either lifeboat is never discussed at all. This incident, in Preston's account, is handled so that I occasionally found myself going "AAAAA," for weeks after reading it. Which is what non-fiction about a horrible human tragedy SHOULD DO.
Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield, by Gayle Tzemach Lemon. Well written and sad.
Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit. Quite good, of course, but it did that thing where reading essays by really angry women makes me feel horribly guilty for not being that angry myself. In cases where I have a form of privilege that the author does not (white or heterosexual, for example), then the guilt is not a bad thing, because with the awareness it brings, I can work harder at being an ally and at listening. But when the author is comparable to me and yet so much angrier, then the guilt feels unproductive. I don't want the only thing I can do to be "get angrier", when I already have so much rage and fear in me every time I think about the state of our world and the possible future for my daughter as a female in it. And... I don't have a tidy way to wrap up this train of thought, unfortunately. I think it's important for me to, without ignoring the bad in the world or not working to change it, remember the circle of hell devoted to those who were unappreciative of the amazing beauty and good in the world while they lived.
Through the Evil Days, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. So Spencer-Fleming seems to be trying to balance out her jerk heroine getting away with jerk behavior by having her hero behave like a big jerk too, in this installment of the series. Charming. And even though the heroine spends some of the book getting called on her selfish and irresponsible behavior, it still wraps up with her whole parish rallying behind her and declaring her the Best Pastor in the History of the World, which given her behavior (pregnant out of wedlock and been consuming drugs and alcohol heavily, including at work and during the first few months of said pregnancy) is one of the least believable tell-not-show-the-heroine's-perfection jobs I have ever read, and that is saying something.
I also re-read Moby-Dick this month, which took me a bit longer (a week) than it takes those charging through it down in New Bedford, but which was fun. More so than a lot of the new stuff I read, I realize as I look over this entry. Well, here's to better reading in 2016.
Read so far in the new year:
Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869, by Stephen Ambrose. Unfortunately, this was a bit boring. Nowhere near as good as Ambrose's book about Lewis and Clark, which I think I will re-read, because there are only about 150 books on my to-read list OH GEEZ.
Started Early, Took My Dog, by Kate Atkinson. Atkinson is super-incredible and I am always excited about her new books and I have to psych myself up for, literally, years to read them. A little ways into this one I really thought I wouldn't be able to go on - child endangerment, dog endangerment, elder endangerment: you name a creature or concept for which you have fondness, Atkinson will break your heart over it. I got through, but the feeling of virtue overrode, if only by a hair, the feeling of enjoyment. The balance has always tipped slightly the other way with her books I've read before.
Thin Air, by Ann Cleeves. I am usually super-into Cleeves' Shetland mysteries, but this one was disappointing. For some reason it pulled out all the old offensive tropes about sexually (and/or professionally) confident women deserving death, and quiet mousy women who date attractive men deserving to be cheated on (or, in many cases [though not this one], the attractive man turns out to be the murderer, because only a homicidal sociopath would date a woman less physically attractive or socially gregarious than himself). There was just too much punishment going on here for it to be a good read.
London Falling, by Paul Cornell. Fifty pages into a foul-mouthed and utterly confusing police procedural with corrupt heroes (reminded me horribly of David Peace's "Red Riding" series; reading half of one of those books measurably diminished my quality of life), I ventured onto the internet to see why this book was popular. And every review said, "The first hundred pages are a nightmare but get through them. Do it." So I carried on. And HOLY COW. It turns into a crazy, designed-for-the-screen (in a good way) supernatural story that I could not put down. Super-gory and scary and drily, Britishly funny and so good. I have the movie / TV show totally cast in my head, and my only regret is that Idris Elba cannot play every role, and I sort of get the feeling Cornell regrets that too. Apparently there's a sequel? Super-psyched!
Copperhead, by Bernard Cornwell. Novel about the Civil War, and clearly researched up one side and down the other, but I really do not care what happens to a protagonist who was raised by abolitionists in Boston but decided to go fight for the South just to piss off his dad. Really. That's our hero. Every now and then he's like, "Well, yes, I suppose if I thought about it I would believe slavery is wrong, but I just don't think about it," and that's the end of it. How nice for you, sir!
The Lost Girls: The True Story of the Cleveland Abductions and the Incredible Rescue of Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus, by John Glatt. At the risk of writing a review shorter than the book's title, I can only say that Glatt is not a very interesting writer and so this book is just a timeline of abuse, and accordingly unpleasant.
The Devil's Making, by Sean Haldane. Historical mystery set in nineteenth-century Canada. The mystery part is kind of minor - you can tell immediately who the murderer is - and it's mostly about our narrator falling in love with a Native woman. The book walks dangerously close to "noble savage" territory in its characterizations, but I rather liked it.
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, by Erik Larson. Meh; Diana Preston's book about the Lusitania is much better. Larson assumes that his readers are total wusses: he has a big ol' Graphic Content warning about an autopsy section that is more decorously vague than anything post-Agatha Christie, and while he technically mentions that lifeboats were being dropped from the ship directly onto other lifeboats full of people, it's literally: "so-and-so saw that the lifeboat fell onto the one below it, and so turned away and tried to find another way off the ship". What happens to the people in either lifeboat is never discussed at all. This incident, in Preston's account, is handled so that I occasionally found myself going "AAAAA," for weeks after reading it. Which is what non-fiction about a horrible human tragedy SHOULD DO.
Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield, by Gayle Tzemach Lemon. Well written and sad.
Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit. Quite good, of course, but it did that thing where reading essays by really angry women makes me feel horribly guilty for not being that angry myself. In cases where I have a form of privilege that the author does not (white or heterosexual, for example), then the guilt is not a bad thing, because with the awareness it brings, I can work harder at being an ally and at listening. But when the author is comparable to me and yet so much angrier, then the guilt feels unproductive. I don't want the only thing I can do to be "get angrier", when I already have so much rage and fear in me every time I think about the state of our world and the possible future for my daughter as a female in it. And... I don't have a tidy way to wrap up this train of thought, unfortunately. I think it's important for me to, without ignoring the bad in the world or not working to change it, remember the circle of hell devoted to those who were unappreciative of the amazing beauty and good in the world while they lived.
Through the Evil Days, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. So Spencer-Fleming seems to be trying to balance out her jerk heroine getting away with jerk behavior by having her hero behave like a big jerk too, in this installment of the series. Charming. And even though the heroine spends some of the book getting called on her selfish and irresponsible behavior, it still wraps up with her whole parish rallying behind her and declaring her the Best Pastor in the History of the World, which given her behavior (pregnant out of wedlock and been consuming drugs and alcohol heavily, including at work and during the first few months of said pregnancy) is one of the least believable tell-not-show-the-heroine's-perfection jobs I have ever read, and that is saying something.
I also re-read Moby-Dick this month, which took me a bit longer (a week) than it takes those charging through it down in New Bedford, but which was fun. More so than a lot of the new stuff I read, I realize as I look over this entry. Well, here's to better reading in 2016.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
quick round-up
I don't have any particular deep thoughts about 2015, I have to say. It flew by in ten feet of snow, a loved one's illness and death, my own health terrors, an enormous transition at work, Berowne embarking on a new career path, and height measurements on walls. Perdita ends the year speaking in complete sentences (even if sometimes I am the only one who understands them), singing in the car, and "reading" to herself when given a book. At least once a day I get choked up by how grown-up she looks, and at least once a day I am stymied by her defiance.
We have just returned from a Christmas trip to New Mexico, where - in addition to having a wonderful time - I ate tons of cheese and contracted a nasty traveling cold and slept for three nights on an uninflated air mattress (it never occurred to us that the pull-out couch bed involved an air mattress, so we slept on springs for three nights until Berowne discovered the issue) and my upper lip chapped so badly that it looked like a chemical burn and I'm still not entirely sure it isn't going to scar. There is a lot of physical rest and healing that needs to go on, is what I'm saying. Berowne is off to a party tonight; my plans include bathing and tucking the toddler into bed and then doing the same for myself.
I'll try to post more often in 2016, and have more to say than "Still tired!" but I make no promises. It's a tiring life, but a good one. Something I realized the other day: I do often wonder what it would be like to have stupid amounts of money, but I never wonder what it would be like to be rich. I already know what that is like.
Read in December:
Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, by Leo Damrosch. Very, very good. I knew almost nothing about Swift and have never read Gulliver's Travels, even though the definitive edition of Swift's journals was edited by my grandparents. I loved this biography and had no trouble with it despite my previous lack of exposure, though I have to confess I am still not very interested in reading GT.
Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, by Robert Kolker. This wasn't bad reportage about four murdered escorts - and the story is just brutal - but I never really got sucked in, particularly with knowing from the title that there wasn't going to be a resolution. Kolker, I felt, doesn't keep track of the various family members and friends of the victims well enough for the reader to do so. I kept forgetting who was linked to which victim, and that added to the feelings of detachment.
A Drink Before the War, by Dennis Lehane. Never read any Lehane before, and this was not a good place to start. I don't really care if two-thirds of the way through your book you have your hero examine his racism, you're still asking me to spend the entire book with a racist. And of course he doesn't have to examine his misogyny or homophobia, no, because that would emasculate him or something. Blech.
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, by Jill Leovy. Oh lord, speak of brutal. Leovy succeeds in every way where Kolker failed, in telling the story of a young black man killed in California. She makes everything both personal and political at once and it is impossible not to be heartbroken and furious. So well done.
The Bookman's Tale, by Charlie Lovett. Sure, let's just keep re-attempting Possession over and over, because so many other writers have Byatt's talent! Oh, wait.
TransAtlantic, by Colum McCann. McCann is so amazing I can't even say, and I think this was the best one of his I've read yet. So beautiful. Although, perhaps because it is about Ireland, in every storyline a child dies.
The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell. This book is what happens when authors are too famous to get edited. After struggling through six hundred pages of painfully-forced fantasy battles and "futuristic" dialogue (sure, five years from now we'll all be saying "device" instead of "call", as in, "I'll device my sister," because FUTURE), I glanced at the last hundred pages, saw they were all McCarthian post-apocolypse with children in danger, and called it a day. If you hated every part of Cloud Atlas except the future-sci-fi bits, then you might like this, but even then the digressions would probably trip you up. Not enjoyable at all.
A Barricade in Hell, by Jaime Lee Moyer. Woman in WWI-era San Francisco sees ghosts. Decent premise and plotting, but our main characters are all interchangeably impossibly attractive, impossibly gifted, impossibly boring.
The Dog Lived (and So Will I), by Teresa Rhyne. Memoir about Rhyne getting a beagle, having that beagle diagnosed with cancer, and then being diagnosed with cancer herself in quick succession. Not bad, though she talks with much more feeling and clarity about her fears for her dog's life and health than she does about her own. Which I understand: dealing with a cancer diagnosis yourself is so frightening that you end up numbed and detached out of necessity. Your brain has to stop examining your emotions or you wouldn't be able to function, and looking back your memories are pretty vague, so it actually doesn't make for the best memoir fodder. I mostly read this for the title, of course.
Children of the Revolution, by Peter Robinson. Not a remarkable entry in his Inspector Banks series, and I'm pretty done with the fact that if Banks meets an exotically beautiful woman half his age during the investigation, you know that they're going to start dating (at least until two books from now, when he will find a new one). It's getting laughable.
Have a safe and happy New Year, everyone. May you all be rich.
We have just returned from a Christmas trip to New Mexico, where - in addition to having a wonderful time - I ate tons of cheese and contracted a nasty traveling cold and slept for three nights on an uninflated air mattress (it never occurred to us that the pull-out couch bed involved an air mattress, so we slept on springs for three nights until Berowne discovered the issue) and my upper lip chapped so badly that it looked like a chemical burn and I'm still not entirely sure it isn't going to scar. There is a lot of physical rest and healing that needs to go on, is what I'm saying. Berowne is off to a party tonight; my plans include bathing and tucking the toddler into bed and then doing the same for myself.
I'll try to post more often in 2016, and have more to say than "Still tired!" but I make no promises. It's a tiring life, but a good one. Something I realized the other day: I do often wonder what it would be like to have stupid amounts of money, but I never wonder what it would be like to be rich. I already know what that is like.
Read in December:
Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, by Leo Damrosch. Very, very good. I knew almost nothing about Swift and have never read Gulliver's Travels, even though the definitive edition of Swift's journals was edited by my grandparents. I loved this biography and had no trouble with it despite my previous lack of exposure, though I have to confess I am still not very interested in reading GT.
Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, by Robert Kolker. This wasn't bad reportage about four murdered escorts - and the story is just brutal - but I never really got sucked in, particularly with knowing from the title that there wasn't going to be a resolution. Kolker, I felt, doesn't keep track of the various family members and friends of the victims well enough for the reader to do so. I kept forgetting who was linked to which victim, and that added to the feelings of detachment.
A Drink Before the War, by Dennis Lehane. Never read any Lehane before, and this was not a good place to start. I don't really care if two-thirds of the way through your book you have your hero examine his racism, you're still asking me to spend the entire book with a racist. And of course he doesn't have to examine his misogyny or homophobia, no, because that would emasculate him or something. Blech.
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, by Jill Leovy. Oh lord, speak of brutal. Leovy succeeds in every way where Kolker failed, in telling the story of a young black man killed in California. She makes everything both personal and political at once and it is impossible not to be heartbroken and furious. So well done.
The Bookman's Tale, by Charlie Lovett. Sure, let's just keep re-attempting Possession over and over, because so many other writers have Byatt's talent! Oh, wait.
TransAtlantic, by Colum McCann. McCann is so amazing I can't even say, and I think this was the best one of his I've read yet. So beautiful. Although, perhaps because it is about Ireland, in every storyline a child dies.
The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell. This book is what happens when authors are too famous to get edited. After struggling through six hundred pages of painfully-forced fantasy battles and "futuristic" dialogue (sure, five years from now we'll all be saying "device" instead of "call", as in, "I'll device my sister," because FUTURE), I glanced at the last hundred pages, saw they were all McCarthian post-apocolypse with children in danger, and called it a day. If you hated every part of Cloud Atlas except the future-sci-fi bits, then you might like this, but even then the digressions would probably trip you up. Not enjoyable at all.
A Barricade in Hell, by Jaime Lee Moyer. Woman in WWI-era San Francisco sees ghosts. Decent premise and plotting, but our main characters are all interchangeably impossibly attractive, impossibly gifted, impossibly boring.
The Dog Lived (and So Will I), by Teresa Rhyne. Memoir about Rhyne getting a beagle, having that beagle diagnosed with cancer, and then being diagnosed with cancer herself in quick succession. Not bad, though she talks with much more feeling and clarity about her fears for her dog's life and health than she does about her own. Which I understand: dealing with a cancer diagnosis yourself is so frightening that you end up numbed and detached out of necessity. Your brain has to stop examining your emotions or you wouldn't be able to function, and looking back your memories are pretty vague, so it actually doesn't make for the best memoir fodder. I mostly read this for the title, of course.
Children of the Revolution, by Peter Robinson. Not a remarkable entry in his Inspector Banks series, and I'm pretty done with the fact that if Banks meets an exotically beautiful woman half his age during the investigation, you know that they're going to start dating (at least until two books from now, when he will find a new one). It's getting laughable.
Have a safe and happy New Year, everyone. May you all be rich.
Sunday, November 29, 2015
quick thoughts and books
Terrifying moments in the life of a toddler's parent:
- When you approach the daycare door at the end of the day and can't remember what you dressed her in that morning, and become convinced you will not recognize her. (I actually didn't, the first time they put her hair up, and couldn't find her in a group of other children. The staff had to be like, "Um, right there? Staring at you?")
- When you realize just how much karma was accumulating every time you judged the parent of a child who was out in public with unbrushed hair. I have to factor ten minutes of chasing her around the house with a comb into every morning, and her ponytails still look like they were created by drunken sloths.
- When you have to run into the other room for a moment, and you ask her, "Perdita, will you be all right?" and she looks up at you with huge eyes and nods very solemnly, and you get hit with a pomegranate-scented wave of all the future moments when she won't be all right and you won't be able to fix it, and you start crying so hard that you almost fall down the basement stairs.
- Attempting to zip up the deadly-snug thigh section of the footie pajamas without snagging a roll.
Read lately:
The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, by Denise Kiernan. Tells the story of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the community that processed the uranium for the atomic bombs. Decent but not really as much about the individual women as I wanted it to be - lots of digressions into the political backdrop, which meant that the ubiquitous old white dudes running the show became major characters.
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. The premise is that the world has ended and a troupe of Canadian actors wanders North America performing Shakespeare. HOW COULD I NOT. However, it turned out that that storyline was really annoying / upsetting, and I was glad that there were plenty of other storylines. It was annoying because our ostensible heroine is impossibly beautiful, impossibly bad-ass (can hit a target with a thrown knife while blindfolded, we are told), and supposedly the best Shakespearean actress the post-apocalyptic world has ever seen (comment withheld). She is, not coincidentally, really boring and I didn't care what happened to her. It was upsetting because since I had a child I cannot handle apocalypse scenarios, unless I convince myself that in the event of 99% of the world succumbing to a death flu the remaining 1% would be really nice to each other. (Also surely someone would have gotten the power back on after twenty years - as Berowne pointed out, hydroelectric dams are going to still be around, and it's not like instruction manuals will cease to exist.) I kind of have to believe that people will be nice to each other. Otherwise you start thinking like Cormac McCarthy, and then your idea of post-apocalyptic mothering is a woman who talks about her "whorish heart" and her pathetic womanly inability to protect her child, and then kills herself, and then you end up divorced three times which I'm sure is a total coincidence.
I didn't want motherhood to turn me into a total wimp about death in books. It was already bad enough that the mention of a dog's mortality in even, like, the acknowledgements of a book would make me bawl, but now I'm just a total disaster. The week I was reading Station Eleven I seriously had to hold myself back from trying to pack a year's worth of supplies into the car (which, for the record, is a Ford Focus) JUST IN CASE.
Also, I know that bicycles are undignified, but we have all (meaning the internet) acknowledged that their lack of dignity is no longer a good enough reason for post-apocalyptic stories to keep pretending they don't exist, and so reading a book published this year that continues said pretence was frustrating.
The Weight of Blood, by Laura McHugh. Boo-ring. Our impossibly beautiful teenage heroine attempts to find out what happened to her impossibly beautiful mother, and I am excessively not into stories about things happening to women because they are beautiful / women getting away with profoundly stupid behavior because they are beautiful.
Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner, by Judy Melinek. Good and interesting. It's almost too light in tone some of the time, but at the end, when she tells the story of being one of the pathologists working the World Trade Center remains on and after 9/11, it gets just the right tone and is really affecting.
The Swan Gondola, by Timothy Schaffert. SO twee. Not badly written by any means, though it does just go on and on, but it's simply a Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy set at the end of the nineteenth century, and those are eye-rolling no matter when you set them. No, really, you do have to give me more than "she's adorably unpredictable and dresses uniquely and has a tattoo" to describe a love interest the pursuit of whom can interestingly take up a whole, long, book. I finished it through stubbornness.
And the little miss has woken from her nap! Time to dash.
- When you approach the daycare door at the end of the day and can't remember what you dressed her in that morning, and become convinced you will not recognize her. (I actually didn't, the first time they put her hair up, and couldn't find her in a group of other children. The staff had to be like, "Um, right there? Staring at you?")
- When you realize just how much karma was accumulating every time you judged the parent of a child who was out in public with unbrushed hair. I have to factor ten minutes of chasing her around the house with a comb into every morning, and her ponytails still look like they were created by drunken sloths.
- When you have to run into the other room for a moment, and you ask her, "Perdita, will you be all right?" and she looks up at you with huge eyes and nods very solemnly, and you get hit with a pomegranate-scented wave of all the future moments when she won't be all right and you won't be able to fix it, and you start crying so hard that you almost fall down the basement stairs.
- Attempting to zip up the deadly-snug thigh section of the footie pajamas without snagging a roll.
Read lately:
The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, by Denise Kiernan. Tells the story of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the community that processed the uranium for the atomic bombs. Decent but not really as much about the individual women as I wanted it to be - lots of digressions into the political backdrop, which meant that the ubiquitous old white dudes running the show became major characters.
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. The premise is that the world has ended and a troupe of Canadian actors wanders North America performing Shakespeare. HOW COULD I NOT. However, it turned out that that storyline was really annoying / upsetting, and I was glad that there were plenty of other storylines. It was annoying because our ostensible heroine is impossibly beautiful, impossibly bad-ass (can hit a target with a thrown knife while blindfolded, we are told), and supposedly the best Shakespearean actress the post-apocalyptic world has ever seen (comment withheld). She is, not coincidentally, really boring and I didn't care what happened to her. It was upsetting because since I had a child I cannot handle apocalypse scenarios, unless I convince myself that in the event of 99% of the world succumbing to a death flu the remaining 1% would be really nice to each other. (Also surely someone would have gotten the power back on after twenty years - as Berowne pointed out, hydroelectric dams are going to still be around, and it's not like instruction manuals will cease to exist.) I kind of have to believe that people will be nice to each other. Otherwise you start thinking like Cormac McCarthy, and then your idea of post-apocalyptic mothering is a woman who talks about her "whorish heart" and her pathetic womanly inability to protect her child, and then kills herself, and then you end up divorced three times which I'm sure is a total coincidence.
I didn't want motherhood to turn me into a total wimp about death in books. It was already bad enough that the mention of a dog's mortality in even, like, the acknowledgements of a book would make me bawl, but now I'm just a total disaster. The week I was reading Station Eleven I seriously had to hold myself back from trying to pack a year's worth of supplies into the car (which, for the record, is a Ford Focus) JUST IN CASE.
Also, I know that bicycles are undignified, but we have all (meaning the internet) acknowledged that their lack of dignity is no longer a good enough reason for post-apocalyptic stories to keep pretending they don't exist, and so reading a book published this year that continues said pretence was frustrating.
The Weight of Blood, by Laura McHugh. Boo-ring. Our impossibly beautiful teenage heroine attempts to find out what happened to her impossibly beautiful mother, and I am excessively not into stories about things happening to women because they are beautiful / women getting away with profoundly stupid behavior because they are beautiful.
Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner, by Judy Melinek. Good and interesting. It's almost too light in tone some of the time, but at the end, when she tells the story of being one of the pathologists working the World Trade Center remains on and after 9/11, it gets just the right tone and is really affecting.
The Swan Gondola, by Timothy Schaffert. SO twee. Not badly written by any means, though it does just go on and on, but it's simply a Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy set at the end of the nineteenth century, and those are eye-rolling no matter when you set them. No, really, you do have to give me more than "she's adorably unpredictable and dresses uniquely and has a tattoo" to describe a love interest the pursuit of whom can interestingly take up a whole, long, book. I finished it through stubbornness.
And the little miss has woken from her nap! Time to dash.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
many books and few life lessons
I turned thirty-nine yesterday, and feel like I should have some Profound Wisdom to share about what I have learned in thirty-nine years as a woman (or maybe that's for when you turn forty? I dunno), but most days I feel like all I have learned is how to pretend that I don't constantly feel like a fifteen-year-old with trick joints. There was a plan in the back of my head to share a list of Things I Have Learned for this post, but since I didn't write anything down in preparation, all I've got are things I have thought about in the last forty-eight hours (and even that is probably giving my long-term memory too much credit).
1. Desitin stains never, ever, come out of clothing. I've sacrificed two pairs of dress pants to my child's diaper rash in the last three weeks. (Those of you capable of slathering diaper cream on a squirming, screaming toddler and not getting any on yourself are probably the same people who, pre-baby, could wear light clothing to work because you wouldn't spill coffee on yourself in the car before even getting out of the driveway. You live in a magical world the gates of which are forever closed to me.)
2. There is no reward for being the good girl. There is no moment when the universe sends you a note saying, "Because you are thin and quiet and helpful and don't take up space, here is your solid gold house." There is just you, waiting for this and, when it doesn't come, deciding that it's because you won't deserve your reward until you're even thinner, or until you stop ever asking for what you want, because you did that like three times in the last year and clearly need to be punished for your appalling selfishness. The good-girl reward never shows up. (In the case of things like raises, the reward will only show up if you ask for it, which is why silent martyrdom is self-sabotaging.) People far more selfish and thoughtless than you will always seem to be doing better, and no, it's not fair, but you have to stop doing anything that you are only doing in the hopes of getting a gold star or you will drive yourself insane. If you do something stereotypically good-girl-ish because it's genuinely something you like to do, rock on. But pay enough attention to your own motivations to know the difference.
3. Speaking of differences, telling yourself, "The house needs to be clean," versus telling yourself, "I want the house to be cleaner," can change entirely your attitude about housework. At least it did for me, this morning. Also helpful: thinking about standing in front of Anubis' scales with various other women and having him say, "Okay, the only thing I'm putting in this scale is whether you kept your house spotless, and anyone who didn't gets eaten by the crocodile demon," and even the crocodile demon saying OH COME ON.
4. You're not going to run out of books to read. You can put that book that you hate down. Really. You can. You probably won't actually be cursed if you do. Probably.
And speaking of books:
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War, by Karen Abbott. Really, really good, as I hoped it would be. The four women Abbott picked are two for the Confederacy and two for the Union, and she doesn't truly try to be objective about the Southern ones. Upon review, I don't think she had the option to be: she has the women's own words to use against them, and these women were racist and awful. It was a fascinating book.
Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard, by Laura Bates. This was not about Bates' program teaching Shakespeare in prisons, which is what it purported to be. It was about Bates becoming totally obsessed with one prisoner and publishing all her conversations with him, only two or three of which really have to do with Shakespeare. Very disappointing.
An Old Betrayal, by Charles Finch. Light period mystery.
Die Again, by Tess Gerritsen. The Rizzoli and Isles books are pretty formulaic, but this one actually kept me up late, nervous and invested. Well done.
A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. Yup, pretty wrenching.
The Quick, by Lauren Owen. So good! Victorian vampires, though that wasn't even clear from the first eighty pages... it slow-builds and then just goes crazy in the best possible way. I was genuinely frightened, I was emotionally invested in characters, I cried, I didn't want it to end, and I really really hope that the possible-sequel which is set up at the end happens. Recommended unhesitatingly if you like that sort of thing and have some tolerance for gore.
Vanessa and Her Sister, by Priya Parmar. A novel about the Bloomsbury Group from the point of view of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister. It's beautifully written to an extent that sometimes had me reading a page over and over, and yet that beauty never felt forced. What did feel forced were the letter portions - usually letters from Lytton Strachey to someone else, always on the topic of how amazing Vanessa is, because the readers need to be told that. Which, frankly, we didn't: as a narrator/character, we got everything we needed to for her to be sympathetic and impressive. The letters irritated me. Also irritating was the fact that Parmar spent the entire book building up to what was narratively displayed as the Great Love of Vanessa's Life, and then in the afterword said, "Oh, she was with this guy for maybe two years, and then she left him for her brother's ex-boyfriend with whom she had a child and lived for forty years." WHAT? It is historically true, yes, but knowing that this was historically true (which I didn't beforehand) makes Parmar's narrative decision even weirder. It's too bad, because, other than that and the letters, this book was amazing.
A New York Christmas, by Anne Perry. Another of her little Christmas novellas. Cute, relaxing.
The Transcriptionist, by Amy Rowland. Strange little novel about a woman working at a newspaper in New York. No one really behaves like a human being and it tries both to be dreamy and brutal about life. I had no problem finishing it but it never made me care.
The Impossible Rescue: The True Story of an Amazing Arctic Adventure, by Martin W. Sandler. A YA book about the Overland Relief Expedition, organized to save 265 whalers trapped in the ice in the winter of 1897. The rescuers drove giant herds of reindeer to the winter campsite so that everyone would have enough meat to make it until the ice permitted rescue ships to make it through. Quite interesting, although of course there were dog fatalities, but Sandler skims over them as fast as he can. I appreciate that.
The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers. Not racist! Albeit a lot of it makes no sense unless you know church bell ringing intimately.
The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey. A re-read, of a fun little book about a bedridden detective looking into the story of the Princes in the Tower.
And I abandoned The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century, by Paul Collins. At first tedium was its only crime, and I was willing to keep powering through the dullness of a thousand popes, but then Collins announced that Islam is an inherently violent religion, and that Christians would never have come up with the idea of killing people over religion if they hadn't been exposed to Islam. You can imagine how well I reacted to that statement, especially at the goddamned moment. Tedium and xenophobia cross a line that even the demon crocodile of unfinished books would understand.
May you all be safe, with your loved ones and good books, on these strange and frightening nights.
1. Desitin stains never, ever, come out of clothing. I've sacrificed two pairs of dress pants to my child's diaper rash in the last three weeks. (Those of you capable of slathering diaper cream on a squirming, screaming toddler and not getting any on yourself are probably the same people who, pre-baby, could wear light clothing to work because you wouldn't spill coffee on yourself in the car before even getting out of the driveway. You live in a magical world the gates of which are forever closed to me.)
2. There is no reward for being the good girl. There is no moment when the universe sends you a note saying, "Because you are thin and quiet and helpful and don't take up space, here is your solid gold house." There is just you, waiting for this and, when it doesn't come, deciding that it's because you won't deserve your reward until you're even thinner, or until you stop ever asking for what you want, because you did that like three times in the last year and clearly need to be punished for your appalling selfishness. The good-girl reward never shows up. (In the case of things like raises, the reward will only show up if you ask for it, which is why silent martyrdom is self-sabotaging.) People far more selfish and thoughtless than you will always seem to be doing better, and no, it's not fair, but you have to stop doing anything that you are only doing in the hopes of getting a gold star or you will drive yourself insane. If you do something stereotypically good-girl-ish because it's genuinely something you like to do, rock on. But pay enough attention to your own motivations to know the difference.
3. Speaking of differences, telling yourself, "The house needs to be clean," versus telling yourself, "I want the house to be cleaner," can change entirely your attitude about housework. At least it did for me, this morning. Also helpful: thinking about standing in front of Anubis' scales with various other women and having him say, "Okay, the only thing I'm putting in this scale is whether you kept your house spotless, and anyone who didn't gets eaten by the crocodile demon," and even the crocodile demon saying OH COME ON.
4. You're not going to run out of books to read. You can put that book that you hate down. Really. You can. You probably won't actually be cursed if you do. Probably.
And speaking of books:
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War, by Karen Abbott. Really, really good, as I hoped it would be. The four women Abbott picked are two for the Confederacy and two for the Union, and she doesn't truly try to be objective about the Southern ones. Upon review, I don't think she had the option to be: she has the women's own words to use against them, and these women were racist and awful. It was a fascinating book.
Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard, by Laura Bates. This was not about Bates' program teaching Shakespeare in prisons, which is what it purported to be. It was about Bates becoming totally obsessed with one prisoner and publishing all her conversations with him, only two or three of which really have to do with Shakespeare. Very disappointing.
An Old Betrayal, by Charles Finch. Light period mystery.
Die Again, by Tess Gerritsen. The Rizzoli and Isles books are pretty formulaic, but this one actually kept me up late, nervous and invested. Well done.
A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. Yup, pretty wrenching.
The Quick, by Lauren Owen. So good! Victorian vampires, though that wasn't even clear from the first eighty pages... it slow-builds and then just goes crazy in the best possible way. I was genuinely frightened, I was emotionally invested in characters, I cried, I didn't want it to end, and I really really hope that the possible-sequel which is set up at the end happens. Recommended unhesitatingly if you like that sort of thing and have some tolerance for gore.
Vanessa and Her Sister, by Priya Parmar. A novel about the Bloomsbury Group from the point of view of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister. It's beautifully written to an extent that sometimes had me reading a page over and over, and yet that beauty never felt forced. What did feel forced were the letter portions - usually letters from Lytton Strachey to someone else, always on the topic of how amazing Vanessa is, because the readers need to be told that. Which, frankly, we didn't: as a narrator/character, we got everything we needed to for her to be sympathetic and impressive. The letters irritated me. Also irritating was the fact that Parmar spent the entire book building up to what was narratively displayed as the Great Love of Vanessa's Life, and then in the afterword said, "Oh, she was with this guy for maybe two years, and then she left him for her brother's ex-boyfriend with whom she had a child and lived for forty years." WHAT? It is historically true, yes, but knowing that this was historically true (which I didn't beforehand) makes Parmar's narrative decision even weirder. It's too bad, because, other than that and the letters, this book was amazing.
A New York Christmas, by Anne Perry. Another of her little Christmas novellas. Cute, relaxing.
The Transcriptionist, by Amy Rowland. Strange little novel about a woman working at a newspaper in New York. No one really behaves like a human being and it tries both to be dreamy and brutal about life. I had no problem finishing it but it never made me care.
The Impossible Rescue: The True Story of an Amazing Arctic Adventure, by Martin W. Sandler. A YA book about the Overland Relief Expedition, organized to save 265 whalers trapped in the ice in the winter of 1897. The rescuers drove giant herds of reindeer to the winter campsite so that everyone would have enough meat to make it until the ice permitted rescue ships to make it through. Quite interesting, although of course there were dog fatalities, but Sandler skims over them as fast as he can. I appreciate that.
The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers. Not racist! Albeit a lot of it makes no sense unless you know church bell ringing intimately.
The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey. A re-read, of a fun little book about a bedridden detective looking into the story of the Princes in the Tower.
And I abandoned The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century, by Paul Collins. At first tedium was its only crime, and I was willing to keep powering through the dullness of a thousand popes, but then Collins announced that Islam is an inherently violent religion, and that Christians would never have come up with the idea of killing people over religion if they hadn't been exposed to Islam. You can imagine how well I reacted to that statement, especially at the goddamned moment. Tedium and xenophobia cross a line that even the demon crocodile of unfinished books would understand.
May you all be safe, with your loved ones and good books, on these strange and frightening nights.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
ten years
Ten years ago, I sat hungover in the bath, sulky and self-pitying, and thought, "I've had my last drink."
I'd thought that before. Experimentally, of course: just to see what that thought would feel like as it wandered through my brain. Always a What if in front of it and a question mark following. And it always induced total panic. Scrambling, terrified, can't-let-this-happen, panic. Even at the end, when I wasn't drinking in public and so I was already having to deal with social events sober. Even when I was restricting myself to one night a month when I could drink. I had to know that that one night would come, to deal with all the others.
But that evening, in the tub, the thought sat solid in my mind and didn't frighten me. I let it sit, and after a while it had, not a period as the punctuation mark (hello hubris!), but perhaps an ellipsis. And I got out of the bath, and went to bed, and I got up the next morning and didn't drink that day. 3,653 days later, I have not had another drink.
It wasn't all puppies and rainbows, of course. Still isn't. I had to re-negotiate all my relationships, had to accept that it wasn't the booze making me petty and judgmental and envious, had to figure out which social events I could handle and which are, to this day, wicked triggers. The first puppy didn't come along for three years. I thought sobriety would solve the problems between my fiancé and me, and so went ahead with the marriage, to both our griefs. I did drop twenty pounds in six months and my skin cleared up, but everything else came very slowly. A lot of it remains in process, and always will.
One of the tricks to staying sober is being clear-eyed enough about the person you were and the things you did while drinking to know that you don't want to be there again - while at the same time believing yourself to be worthwhile enough to deserve sobriety and the improvements in life that come with it. This is really, really hard. I live in a house where I've never had a drink, drive a car that I've never taken to a liquor store, and am married to a man who's never seen me with a drop of alcohol in my body. But some days I still think of myself as that person, at whom I'm so angry and in whom I'm so disappointed, and I know I don't deserve a thing.
When I think about it, I keep circling back to 1 Kings 19:11-12.
And he said, Go forth and stand on the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:
And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
My beliefs are private, so I'm not going to go into them here (though I think that you don't have to believe in anything in particular to recognize this as one of the most beautiful passages in the English language). But as a description of addiction and recovery, I could not find better than this.
For the first eighteen years of my life I was in large Southwestern public schools and I was the smart one, and then I was dropped into a tiny Eastern liberal arts college where everyone was smarter than I was. I opened my mouth roughly four times in my first-year English class, and four times I said something which made eyes roll all over the room, and my understanding of the world and my role in it collapsed. I couldn't answer questions about books correctly or intelligently, and the rest of my classes were even worse. The phrase "identity crisis" doesn't even touch it: it was like I'd woken up in someone else's head. And suddenly all I heard from my inner voice was You idiot. How could you not know that? How could you be so stupid? No one will ever like you. Heaven knows I'd had vile things to say to myself for years about my appearance and social anxiety, but never about my mind.
(You can understand why I get a bit defensive about it. One is supposed to have a reason for addiction that's more along the lines of "someone died / I was abused / horrific car accident", and not "I went to a really elite college and it made me feel stupid". But this is how it was.)
Somewhere along the line I made a desperate decision about who I would be, and it wasn't an actor or a writer or even a goofball - when I lost confidence in my academic abilities I lost confidence in everything else associated with my brain, talents and humor included. All I could come up with was the intense, crazy, wild girl, who was still quiet and shy during the day but with a few drinks in her danced like a dervish and went after the boys she wanted and dared anything. I couldn't think of anything else to be. I didn't like her, but I liked myself even less. I didn't like being her, but she got attention, and the only other version of me I knew had, I believed, disappeared. And as time went on, it took more than a few drinks to find that loud brave-terrified version of me, and finding her felt more crucial, and the downhill tumble began.
We get addicted to substances because (among other reasons) they seem to give us silence instead of the hectoring, hating voice we hear inside ourselves. They provide what feels like blissful oblivion. The moment you realize that what masquerades as silence is actually noise, the moment when the use starts making you feel worse instead of better, is a turning point. Not necessarily towards sobriety: after all, noise that drowns out what you don't want to think about is still better than thinking about it, in an addict's mind. Sure, you might feel worse drunk or high, but at least you are keeping that worse, along with all your other feelings, at arm's length. The trade-off seems worth it, for a while.
I sought myself, redemption, peace, grace, whatever I had no name for, in wind and earthquake and fire. I made everything louder and brighter and more furious, while staying numb and detached, and tried to find salvation in the blur and the noise. It was not in the wind, and not in the earthquake, and not in the fire.
After the fire, a still small voice. Years after, and often I cannot hear it for weeks at a time, when I don't let myself stop or hope, when I get mired in the old habits of self-deprecation and inadequacy. But it is there, at the core.
It can, however, be shaken by something like making a stupid typo in my Facebook post marking ten years of sobriety, and having that typo SIT THERE, ON THE INTERNET, for FIVE HOURS, before Berowne gently pointed it out. THIRTY WHOLE PEOPLE, all of whom are kindly inclined towards me, saw that typo before I corrected it, and I let the embarrassment of that outweigh any pride in ten years sober. There might even have been some crying in the car after work. So yesterday was soured for me, and I'm hoping that today I can actually be proud of myself.
There will always be a voice ready to say, "A mistake? An imperfection? You deserve no happiness and no one will ever like you." Nothing eradicates that entirely. But there is the still small voice too. There is that, reminding me that I can be insecure and flawed and still strong to my bones. Living in recovery is literally being a warrior for the working day, and, by the mass, my heart is in the trim.
(Unless, of course, I find a typo in this after I post it.)
I'd thought that before. Experimentally, of course: just to see what that thought would feel like as it wandered through my brain. Always a What if in front of it and a question mark following. And it always induced total panic. Scrambling, terrified, can't-let-this-happen, panic. Even at the end, when I wasn't drinking in public and so I was already having to deal with social events sober. Even when I was restricting myself to one night a month when I could drink. I had to know that that one night would come, to deal with all the others.
But that evening, in the tub, the thought sat solid in my mind and didn't frighten me. I let it sit, and after a while it had, not a period as the punctuation mark (hello hubris!), but perhaps an ellipsis. And I got out of the bath, and went to bed, and I got up the next morning and didn't drink that day. 3,653 days later, I have not had another drink.
It wasn't all puppies and rainbows, of course. Still isn't. I had to re-negotiate all my relationships, had to accept that it wasn't the booze making me petty and judgmental and envious, had to figure out which social events I could handle and which are, to this day, wicked triggers. The first puppy didn't come along for three years. I thought sobriety would solve the problems between my fiancé and me, and so went ahead with the marriage, to both our griefs. I did drop twenty pounds in six months and my skin cleared up, but everything else came very slowly. A lot of it remains in process, and always will.
One of the tricks to staying sober is being clear-eyed enough about the person you were and the things you did while drinking to know that you don't want to be there again - while at the same time believing yourself to be worthwhile enough to deserve sobriety and the improvements in life that come with it. This is really, really hard. I live in a house where I've never had a drink, drive a car that I've never taken to a liquor store, and am married to a man who's never seen me with a drop of alcohol in my body. But some days I still think of myself as that person, at whom I'm so angry and in whom I'm so disappointed, and I know I don't deserve a thing.
When I think about it, I keep circling back to 1 Kings 19:11-12.
And he said, Go forth and stand on the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:
And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
My beliefs are private, so I'm not going to go into them here (though I think that you don't have to believe in anything in particular to recognize this as one of the most beautiful passages in the English language). But as a description of addiction and recovery, I could not find better than this.
For the first eighteen years of my life I was in large Southwestern public schools and I was the smart one, and then I was dropped into a tiny Eastern liberal arts college where everyone was smarter than I was. I opened my mouth roughly four times in my first-year English class, and four times I said something which made eyes roll all over the room, and my understanding of the world and my role in it collapsed. I couldn't answer questions about books correctly or intelligently, and the rest of my classes were even worse. The phrase "identity crisis" doesn't even touch it: it was like I'd woken up in someone else's head. And suddenly all I heard from my inner voice was You idiot. How could you not know that? How could you be so stupid? No one will ever like you. Heaven knows I'd had vile things to say to myself for years about my appearance and social anxiety, but never about my mind.
(You can understand why I get a bit defensive about it. One is supposed to have a reason for addiction that's more along the lines of "someone died / I was abused / horrific car accident", and not "I went to a really elite college and it made me feel stupid". But this is how it was.)
Somewhere along the line I made a desperate decision about who I would be, and it wasn't an actor or a writer or even a goofball - when I lost confidence in my academic abilities I lost confidence in everything else associated with my brain, talents and humor included. All I could come up with was the intense, crazy, wild girl, who was still quiet and shy during the day but with a few drinks in her danced like a dervish and went after the boys she wanted and dared anything. I couldn't think of anything else to be. I didn't like her, but I liked myself even less. I didn't like being her, but she got attention, and the only other version of me I knew had, I believed, disappeared. And as time went on, it took more than a few drinks to find that loud brave-terrified version of me, and finding her felt more crucial, and the downhill tumble began.
We get addicted to substances because (among other reasons) they seem to give us silence instead of the hectoring, hating voice we hear inside ourselves. They provide what feels like blissful oblivion. The moment you realize that what masquerades as silence is actually noise, the moment when the use starts making you feel worse instead of better, is a turning point. Not necessarily towards sobriety: after all, noise that drowns out what you don't want to think about is still better than thinking about it, in an addict's mind. Sure, you might feel worse drunk or high, but at least you are keeping that worse, along with all your other feelings, at arm's length. The trade-off seems worth it, for a while.
I sought myself, redemption, peace, grace, whatever I had no name for, in wind and earthquake and fire. I made everything louder and brighter and more furious, while staying numb and detached, and tried to find salvation in the blur and the noise. It was not in the wind, and not in the earthquake, and not in the fire.
After the fire, a still small voice. Years after, and often I cannot hear it for weeks at a time, when I don't let myself stop or hope, when I get mired in the old habits of self-deprecation and inadequacy. But it is there, at the core.
It can, however, be shaken by something like making a stupid typo in my Facebook post marking ten years of sobriety, and having that typo SIT THERE, ON THE INTERNET, for FIVE HOURS, before Berowne gently pointed it out. THIRTY WHOLE PEOPLE, all of whom are kindly inclined towards me, saw that typo before I corrected it, and I let the embarrassment of that outweigh any pride in ten years sober. There might even have been some crying in the car after work. So yesterday was soured for me, and I'm hoping that today I can actually be proud of myself.
There will always be a voice ready to say, "A mistake? An imperfection? You deserve no happiness and no one will ever like you." Nothing eradicates that entirely. But there is the still small voice too. There is that, reminding me that I can be insecure and flawed and still strong to my bones. Living in recovery is literally being a warrior for the working day, and, by the mass, my heart is in the trim.
(Unless, of course, I find a typo in this after I post it.)
Saturday, October 17, 2015
no naps, send help
This week, one of Perdita's daycare teachers said to me, "I was so happy when [her daughter] stopped taking naps, because it gave me so much more flexibility!"
So... that's bizarre, right? It's not just me? When Perdita goes down for naps on the weekends - if she goes down for naps, these days - I think, Okay, likely between one and two (if I'm very lucky) hours to clean, eat, exercise, and blog, and of course those things cannot all be done even if I'm not so unfortunate as to have her wake after thirty-five minutes. Which she did today. It's even worse during the week, when I have to get up at four and be up until ten if I'm to get all of those things plus showering and lunch-packing done. Guess why there hasn't been a blog in a while?
Geez, whine whine whine. I'm just saying that any scenario in which having a toddler around gives you more flexibility (unless we're measuring in "substances likely to end up on your walls") is not one I comprehend. Anyway!
In exciting domestic news, we now have a dishwasher, but I am really ambivalent about it because a) I genuinely believe that labor-saving devices endanger my immortal soul and b) only when you do not have to essentially wash the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher will I be sold on this as a labor-saving device in the first place. I mean, it's just a second wash, right? Or a way to have a larger draining rack than your sink allows? If I'm going to risk hellfire, I want to be able to plop a food-encrusted bowl directly from the table into this machine, damn it. I am sure Cotton Mather would feel the same way.
We managed to get up to the Vermont farmhouse for the holiday weekend, and it was glorious - warmer than last year, so that we were able to spend more time outside and less in the stove-heated kitchen. Perdita did wake up in the middle of the night and was brought into our bed for cuddles, which is how I found out that you really do see stars when someone punches you in the eye. Especially if that person has perfectly eye-socket-sized fists.
But we had a lovely time and life at home is nice too. And I have been managing to read - if I'm honest, "read" should replace "clean" in the second paragraph, because while I think about cleaning during her naps, let's face it, I have my priorities.
Read:
Behind a Mask, by Louisa May Alcott. Alcott wrote sentimental stuff like Little Women for commercial profit; apparently what she really wanted to write were thrillers. I, um, can see why the sentimental stuff sold better. Wilkie Collins she was not.
And Only to Deceive, by Tasha Alexander. Sort-of-mystery, sort-of-society-novel about a rich beautiful young widow in the 1890s. Our heroine is appallingly perfect and desired, and while her friends are interesting as characters, I was Mary Sued out a third of the way through. Finished it through stubbornness, and then made the mistake of reading the afterword where Alexander pulls the "book that had to be written" deal and says that she had a toddler who had just stopped napping but she wrote the first draft of this book in two months, grabbing fifteen minutes here and there, because she knew her whole life that she would be a writer and that's what writers do. "Yeah, writers who don't have a toddler and a full-time job, SO SHUT UP YOU POOPHEAD," I responded maturely.
Sidebar: like I would get a word written if I were a stay-at-home mother. The one piece of slack I cut myself when I was pregnant was to not decide that I needed to write a novel during my maternity leave. I considered that expectation, because of course if I'm getting eleven weeks away from my job ("getting" in the sense of "using painstakingly-accrued-over-the-course-of-eight-years earned time"), then I should totally be able to write a novel. Pregnant, I believe I considered this idea for about twenty seconds, before realizing that if I managed to keep the newborn safe and myself relatively clean for eleven weeks, I would be a warrior fucking princess, and I stand by that statement. Being a stay-at-home parent does not result in copious free time. (Alexander, of course, wasn't saying that it does, but that she is so awesome that she found the time to write anyway.)
Second sidebar / discussion question: what would happen if I spent two months using any of my usual snatched reading time to write instead? I mean, other than my soul shriveling and dying, of course. Sigh. That's the problem - I want the time to do both. The thought of two months without books is horrifying.
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League, by Jeff Hobbs. Peace was an African-American whose father went to prison for murder and whose mother worked unbelievable hours and jobs to get him into private schools. His brilliance was such that an alumnus of his high school paid for him to go to Yale, where the author was his roommate. After graduation, Peace was directionless and eventually ended up going back to selling drugs, and was killed in a turf dispute. This book is very intense and well done, if a little too long. It's a fantastic indictment of race/class privilege in America as well: I was directionless after college, as some of my classmates were, but the chances that any of us - white and with parental safety nets - would end up in Peace's situation were roughly zero. The irony is that he was much more self-reliant and grown-up than we were, but the odds were stacked so high against him from the beginning that his death seems like the only way the story could have gone.
Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, by Carla Kaplan. Very well-written and interesting book about six white women who bankrolled, supported, and otherwise involved themselves in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. I knew virtually nothing about any of them, and really enjoyed Kaplan's clear and informative voice.
Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier, by Tom Kizzia. Yikes. In the early 2000s, a guy calling himself Papa Pilgrim and his sixteen-strong family arrived in remote Alaska (having fled remote New Mexico) and started basically squatting on National Park Service land. The resulting legal war divided the nearest town and eventually ended when the oldest daughter accused her father of decades of physical and sexual abuse. Kizzia is a good and clear writer, though he jumps around chronologically a bit and doesn't even pretend to be unbiased (that's not entirely a criticism - Papa Pilgrim [Bob Hale] was a monster, and the descriptions of child physical abuse and rape are incredibly detailed and sickening). It's a good book, but troubling as hell, and I would definitely stay away if the aforementioned descriptions might be too much.
The Long Way Home, by Louise Penny. Mmm, back-to-back Inspector Gamache books. Cozy for autumn!
Drinker of Blood, by Lynda S. Robinson. Mystery set in ancient Egypt. I couldn't get invested in the characters and am not going to continue with the series.
May you all have bright cold autumn nights and comfortable weekend-afternoon priorities.
So... that's bizarre, right? It's not just me? When Perdita goes down for naps on the weekends - if she goes down for naps, these days - I think, Okay, likely between one and two (if I'm very lucky) hours to clean, eat, exercise, and blog, and of course those things cannot all be done even if I'm not so unfortunate as to have her wake after thirty-five minutes. Which she did today. It's even worse during the week, when I have to get up at four and be up until ten if I'm to get all of those things plus showering and lunch-packing done. Guess why there hasn't been a blog in a while?
Geez, whine whine whine. I'm just saying that any scenario in which having a toddler around gives you more flexibility (unless we're measuring in "substances likely to end up on your walls") is not one I comprehend. Anyway!
In exciting domestic news, we now have a dishwasher, but I am really ambivalent about it because a) I genuinely believe that labor-saving devices endanger my immortal soul and b) only when you do not have to essentially wash the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher will I be sold on this as a labor-saving device in the first place. I mean, it's just a second wash, right? Or a way to have a larger draining rack than your sink allows? If I'm going to risk hellfire, I want to be able to plop a food-encrusted bowl directly from the table into this machine, damn it. I am sure Cotton Mather would feel the same way.
We managed to get up to the Vermont farmhouse for the holiday weekend, and it was glorious - warmer than last year, so that we were able to spend more time outside and less in the stove-heated kitchen. Perdita did wake up in the middle of the night and was brought into our bed for cuddles, which is how I found out that you really do see stars when someone punches you in the eye. Especially if that person has perfectly eye-socket-sized fists.
But we had a lovely time and life at home is nice too. And I have been managing to read - if I'm honest, "read" should replace "clean" in the second paragraph, because while I think about cleaning during her naps, let's face it, I have my priorities.
Read:
Behind a Mask, by Louisa May Alcott. Alcott wrote sentimental stuff like Little Women for commercial profit; apparently what she really wanted to write were thrillers. I, um, can see why the sentimental stuff sold better. Wilkie Collins she was not.
And Only to Deceive, by Tasha Alexander. Sort-of-mystery, sort-of-society-novel about a rich beautiful young widow in the 1890s. Our heroine is appallingly perfect and desired, and while her friends are interesting as characters, I was Mary Sued out a third of the way through. Finished it through stubbornness, and then made the mistake of reading the afterword where Alexander pulls the "book that had to be written" deal and says that she had a toddler who had just stopped napping but she wrote the first draft of this book in two months, grabbing fifteen minutes here and there, because she knew her whole life that she would be a writer and that's what writers do. "Yeah, writers who don't have a toddler and a full-time job, SO SHUT UP YOU POOPHEAD," I responded maturely.
Sidebar: like I would get a word written if I were a stay-at-home mother. The one piece of slack I cut myself when I was pregnant was to not decide that I needed to write a novel during my maternity leave. I considered that expectation, because of course if I'm getting eleven weeks away from my job ("getting" in the sense of "using painstakingly-accrued-over-the-course-of-eight-years earned time"), then I should totally be able to write a novel. Pregnant, I believe I considered this idea for about twenty seconds, before realizing that if I managed to keep the newborn safe and myself relatively clean for eleven weeks, I would be a warrior fucking princess, and I stand by that statement. Being a stay-at-home parent does not result in copious free time. (Alexander, of course, wasn't saying that it does, but that she is so awesome that she found the time to write anyway.)
Second sidebar / discussion question: what would happen if I spent two months using any of my usual snatched reading time to write instead? I mean, other than my soul shriveling and dying, of course. Sigh. That's the problem - I want the time to do both. The thought of two months without books is horrifying.
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League, by Jeff Hobbs. Peace was an African-American whose father went to prison for murder and whose mother worked unbelievable hours and jobs to get him into private schools. His brilliance was such that an alumnus of his high school paid for him to go to Yale, where the author was his roommate. After graduation, Peace was directionless and eventually ended up going back to selling drugs, and was killed in a turf dispute. This book is very intense and well done, if a little too long. It's a fantastic indictment of race/class privilege in America as well: I was directionless after college, as some of my classmates were, but the chances that any of us - white and with parental safety nets - would end up in Peace's situation were roughly zero. The irony is that he was much more self-reliant and grown-up than we were, but the odds were stacked so high against him from the beginning that his death seems like the only way the story could have gone.
Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, by Carla Kaplan. Very well-written and interesting book about six white women who bankrolled, supported, and otherwise involved themselves in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. I knew virtually nothing about any of them, and really enjoyed Kaplan's clear and informative voice.
Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier, by Tom Kizzia. Yikes. In the early 2000s, a guy calling himself Papa Pilgrim and his sixteen-strong family arrived in remote Alaska (having fled remote New Mexico) and started basically squatting on National Park Service land. The resulting legal war divided the nearest town and eventually ended when the oldest daughter accused her father of decades of physical and sexual abuse. Kizzia is a good and clear writer, though he jumps around chronologically a bit and doesn't even pretend to be unbiased (that's not entirely a criticism - Papa Pilgrim [Bob Hale] was a monster, and the descriptions of child physical abuse and rape are incredibly detailed and sickening). It's a good book, but troubling as hell, and I would definitely stay away if the aforementioned descriptions might be too much.
The Long Way Home, by Louise Penny. Mmm, back-to-back Inspector Gamache books. Cozy for autumn!
Drinker of Blood, by Lynda S. Robinson. Mystery set in ancient Egypt. I couldn't get invested in the characters and am not going to continue with the series.
May you all have bright cold autumn nights and comfortable weekend-afternoon priorities.
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